Where's Osama?

September 11 2002

The answer to what became of the al-Qaeda leader depends on whom you ask, Craig Nelson writes from Tora Bora.

The mountains of Tora Bora have fallen silent.

The khaki peaks no longer echo with the thunder of exploding giant bombs or the crack of high-tech sniper rifles. The air no longer ripples with the giddy expectation that at last a noose has been drawn around the neck of the world's most wanted man and needs only one final tug.

For it is here, 10 months ago, that the hunt for Osama bin Laden went cold and yet another round of the game "Where's Osama?" began.

One year after September 11 the pastime is, if anything, more popular than ever, with entries ranging from the banal to the fantastical.

He is dead under the rubble of one of the demolished Tora Bora caves or the victim of failed kidneys. He is alive in Pakistan, after his longtime allies in the ultra-conservative Islamic intelligence establishment there whisked him to safety aboard a helicopter in the dark of night.

Or he has slipped into Mecca, in his native Saudi Arabia, where infidel United States troops dare not trespass without triggering a conflagration with more than 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide.

Hazrat Ali, an Afghan warlord who heads one of the three militias that Washington paid to chase bin Laden and al-Qaeda in December, is eventually, reluctantly, prodded into playing Where's Osama?

"I don't have evidence, but I'm sure he's alive," he sighs.

By his own videotaped account, bin Laden was with his entourage in the southern city of Kandahar when he heard about the September 11 attacks on the radio. "The brothers who heard the news were overjoyed by it," he recalled.

He and his retinue immediately hit the road in a caravan of late-model Toyota LandCruisers, skipping across Afghanistan and visiting his network of training camps, never spending more than 24 hours in one location, Mullah Mohammed Khaksar, a former Taliban official, told the Associated Press recently.

Lounging on a trestle bed in the garden of his heavily guarded compound in Jalalabad, 55 kilometres north-east of Tora Bora, Ali says his informants spotted the fleeing bin Laden in Tora Bora around November 19, three days after the provincial capital fell to anti-Taliban forces.

Tora Bora was not a surprising destination. It leads to a network of smugglers' routes that stretch through mountain passes into Pakistan and it was a legendary camp for US-supported Afghan rebels who fought the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Yet it was another 11 days before US bombs began falling and another five days before US and Afghan forces first clashed with al-Qaeda fighters, joined, it is rumoured locally, by some of the 150 Australian and 23 New Zealand special forces troops deployed in Afghanistan. By then, up to 2000 Arab and Pakistani fighters - and perhaps bin Laden - had already escaped with the aid of local guides.

Lack of speed may have been only part of the problem. There were just 1300 US soldiers in Afghanistan at the time of the Tora Bora siege, not enough to cover all the possible escape routes.

Then, on the other side of the White Mountains that house Tora Bora, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan stopped deploying troops at the Afghan border after Kashmiri rebels attacked the Indian Parliament on December 13 and reinforced his eastern border with India instead, allowing al-Qaeda fighters an even easier getaway.

There have been allegations that during the battle of Tora Bora some Afghans took money from the Americans while selling guarantees of safe passage to members of al-Qaeda.

Ali, who descended from Tora Bora in December and declared to the world that al-Qaeda had been defeated, bristles at the suggestion, saying only: "There was fighting. Some people were killed and some fled. I did my best."

Maybe so, but even General Tommy Franks, the commander of US military forces in Afghanistan, recently offered an ambiguous assessment of the decision to rely on Ali and other warlords to lead the hunt for bin Laden in Tora Bora.

"I am satisfied with the way the operation was conducted," he told a US congressional committee. "No, I won't say that I am satisfied with the decision process that permitted the Afghans to go to work in the Tora Bora area."

It was a rare admission of fallibility in a military operation that has so far cost the US about $US4 billion ($7.3 billion).

Bitter at Islamabad's support for the Taliban, Afghanistan says he is in Pakistan. Eager to convince the world it can control its borders and hardline Islamic opposition, Pakistan says he is in Afghanistan. Frustrated with the grinding search, and with a war in Iraq looming, top officials in US special operations units say he was killed by a bomb in the caves and tunnels of Tora Bora.

For President George Bush, Where's Osama? is a high-stakes game. His brash "dead-or-alive" pronouncements of last September have given way to more carefully calibrated statements designed to reduce bin Laden's importance in the "war against terrorism" and thus minimise any political damage.

"We haven't heard from him in a long time. I don't know if the man's living or the man's dead. But one thing is for certain: the war on terrorists is a lot bigger than one person," Bush said in July.

In Tora Bora, however, bin Laden is still the only terrorist who really matters, especially to the militiamen who stalked him in December and now have little to do but try to benefit from their brief time in the spotlight by charging huge sums for an armed escort to the mountain redoubt for those who still want to play Where's Osama?